Aviation college workers fault abuse of civil service rules

AGGRIEVED workers of the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (NCAT), Zaria have described tenure elongation of principal officers at the college as a gross violation of the federal civil service rule.

Besides, some of the workers who pleaded anonymity and spoke in separate interviews called for intervention of the Federal Government to rescue the college from further decline of its facilities.

Specifically, they alleged that some principal officers occupied positions and exceeded the stipulated tenure, adding that one of them has four different dates of birth, which paved way for him to occupy his present position longer than necessary.

According to the workers, the registrar and bursar of the institution whom they said have exceeded their tenure of office according to civil service rule, are still occupying their positions.

They also argued that some contract staff at the college were presently heading very sensitive departments and units at the expense of permanent staff who have remained stagnant without promotion.

“The series of allegations were gross violation of civil service rule that needed to be checked if safety of the sector and quality service delivery must be maintained,” they stated.

When contacted, the Rector of the college, Captain Samuel Caulckric, who spoke through the Public Relations Officer, Alhaji Mohammed Balarabe-Abubakar confirmed the allegations.

“I am here on behalf of the rector who is unable to attend to you due to official work exigencies. I will respond based on the issues you raised.

“On tenure issue, we have our own scheme of service, which we have been operating but somewhere along the line, from the ministry, we were meant to understand that this scheme of service is not a recognised one. We have to fall back to civil service rules and regulations and we wrote to the Head of Service through the ministry seeking clarification on the tenure issue and they gave us two weeks to come back for response,” he stated.

On contract officers heading departments, the rector said NCAT was a peculiar organisation considering the fact that most of the officers handling affairs are professionals.

“This is aviation industry and when you talk of aviation you talk of lives of human beings, therefore, we have to be very careful. It was necessary to allow some of these contract officers head departments as a result of their experience, because if we allow them go, the system may collapse. But we are still trying to sort things out,” he assured.